Birdcage

1- Love isn't for everyone

If one more person and I really do mean this, if ONE MORE PERSON tells me that there are plenty more fish in the sea I will punch them. It's not that I don't believe in love, because I do. I believe that there is someone out there for everyone and that you and your soulmate are tied together with red string on your pinkie fingers or however those stories go. It's just that I don't believe love is for everyone. I've felt unconditional love from my family and there are friends I have that, I might give an arm for. Maybe not my whole arm, an elbow, my wrist, three fingers max. But that's besides the point. What I'm talking about is romantic love. The type of love that you watch in romance films where they're sworn enemies and then fall in love forever. I spent most of my teenage years watching my friends getting into relationships, watching and waiting for it to happen to me. But it never did. Now I'm 25, a whole quarter of a century that I've been single for.

"Today is the day that I give up on love." "Oh my god, not this again," my best friend, Rosie replies.

"I mean it, I'm never going on a date again. Love just isn't for me."

"You just haven't found the right person yet." I scowled hard at her. She knows how I feel about that sort of talk.
"Before I met Billy, I..." I zoned out for the rest of what she was about to say. Rosie met Billy six months ago on Hinge, and they have been inseparable ever since. It's Rosie's first real relationship and she's smitten. So smitten, that our weekly facetime calls have turned into a few text exchanges here and there. We've only met up once since she met Billy and Rosie spent the whole time talking about him.

I don't want to burst her love bubble but since she met him she's forgotten all about me. She only called tonight to complain that he's gone out with his work friends. Yet another reason, I don't want to fall in love. You become someone your friends hate when you do.

"Look, all I'm saying is that there is someone out there for everyone." "I'm 25, do you honestly think if someone was out there for me, if there was I would have found them by now." Rosie pursed her lips, giving that expression like she knew something that I didn't.

"What are you doing tonight?" I shrugged. I got off work at 6 and came straight home. My parents are away and now my siblings are old enough that they don't need their older sister looking after them. My evenings are now spent staring into the nothingness.

"I don't know, there's some new films out of Netflix. I might watch them." "Didn't you do that last Saturday?" Rosie laughed. "What's your point?"

"How are you going to find someone if you never leave your house?" "I don't want to find someone that's the point." Rosie laughed again and for once I laughed with her. I had missed her a lot, more than I would ever tell her. It isn't a nice feeling knowing you're being replaced, especially when there's nothing you can do to stop it.

"Why don't you go on tinder again?"

"No chance, I'm still too scared to go to that bus stop." I downloaded tinder a couple of months ago at a desperate attempt to not be single and alone forever. I talked to a few people but nothing came out of it. Until I was walking past a bus stop and saw someone I was chatting to on tinder waiting there. Like a normal person I just walked past him until he stopped me and tried to get me to go back to his flat. I deleted tinder the same day.

"Ha, I bet he's still there waiting for you."

"Don't, I think the weirdest thing about that whole encounter wasn't that he tried to get me to come back to his flat but that he was eating a pasty and offered me some." Rosie howled with laughter and I laughed so hard, tears were dripping down my face.

"Not for me." "What about bumble or hinge?" she suggested when we could both finally get out words out. "I don't like hinge. You need to have 6 photos on your profile, I don't even have one good photo of myself."